THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 4, 1995 TAG: 9506300019
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By RAYMOND H. HACKNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
Iread the article awhile back about 11 veterans who were honored after 50 years for being in a severe storm in the Atlantic (in 1944) on the USS Mason while on convoy duty. I don't doubt they deserved to be honored.
Let me tell you a little about my naval career in 1937. When I went down to enlist in the Navy, I was told I had so many things wrong with me that I could not be accepted: mainly bad teeth and underweight. Well, in 1939 when England went to war with Germany, I tried again but was turned down.
I then asked General Sands if he would write a letter to try to get me in. He did and was told all my defects were wavered except my weight: It had to be 120, but I weighed only 113. He was told that before coming down I could eat seven pounds of bananas and drink a lot of water. I did just that. I weighed in at 120.2.
You would have thought that I had been appointed to Annapolis. I was assigned to a 20-year old destroyer, the USS Simpson (DD-221), a four-stacker and one of the roughest riders in the Navy. My brother was also on the Simpson.
On Christmas night 1940, all four ships of the squadron left Key West, Fla., for Norfolk. En route, while passing Cape Hatteras, we ran into a terrible storm. Three of the four destroyers lost a man overboard.
In early 1941, we were transferred to a much larger destroyer, the USS Sampson (DD-394), and in June 1941 we led four-stacker destroyers on convoy duty.
We escorted 60 old ships to Iceland, where the British took over for the trip to Britain. They lost many of their ships to German U-boats, their escorts being very much smaller than ours.
Between that time and Pearl Harbor, our ship sank nine U-boats during our convoy duty.
We were in a most severe storm, and every lifeboat and liferaft on all the ships out there was torn up and washed overboard.
We had the honor of being with President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on the HMS Prince of Wales when the Atlantic charter was signed. Quite an honorable and memorable occasion.
When Pearl Harbor was hit, we went to the Pacific for 32 months, sinking two Japanese submarines and shooting down five Japanese planes.
For all this we were awarded the bronze ``A'' to go on our service medals, which signified actual contact with the enemy before Pearl Harbor.
This is just a little bit of what happened to me during my six years of naval career.
It is all true. MEMO: Mr. Hackney lives in Suffolk. by CNB